Monthly Archives: September 2010

I want to give a shoutout to usabilla.com who’re helping OpenStreetMap with visual feedback on our user experience testing and design.

The concept behind usabilla is super simple, throw anything from full fledged designs to mockups in front of potential users and get click-based feedback. Users get to click on things and leave notes around specific features and parts of a page. So rather than trawling through a list of feedback, you get a more visual and engaging experience from both the testee and the testers perspective. And a whole lot more, check out the intro video below:

I’ve written previously about OSM usability studies, and now it’s happening. Nate Bolt from the fantabulous Bolt|Peters is going to help OSM run usability tests and we need your help.

The timeline looks something like this: This week or next we’re going to switch on some javascript on the OSM signup page that invites a percentage of signups to help OSM run a user survey. Those people fill out a form and are invited later to use some simple online screen capturing software while asked to do some simple tasks and this is where you come in. We need to think of some simple tasks for new users to complete, and we’ll put them together over on this wiki page. Add a street? Find a mailing list? Add a point of interest? What should they do? That’s up to you.

Also, if you’re running a mapping party we can give you a super secret link where you can send new users to do the same tasks with screen recording. You mustn’t help them on the first go, as that’s exactly what we’re trying to find out – what goes wrong.

Then on December 8th (tentative) at the Bolt|Peters office in San Francisco, OSMers together with the UX wizards will analyze the videos and make some joint suggestions on how to push things forward. Anyone in SF, or can be in SF around then, please drop me a mail.

How about a nice drink of water? Refreshing on a warm day, especially nice when one has worked up a sweat by collecting information for OpenStreetMap. We can sometimes forget that we need water to live. Sadly, not everybody can take for granted reliable access to safe drinking water.

On 28 July 2010, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution that declares “the right to safe and clean drinking water and sanitation as a human right that is essential for the full enjoyment of life and all human rights.” In 2005, more than 3.5 Million people died of water-borne illness.

This Project of the Week is also the first Project of the Month. Add drinking water locations to the map. In some places we’ll be adding public water fountains as a courtesy to outdoor exercisers, in others we’ll be adding the critical public water access points.

Put drinking water on the map.

Find out more about how to add drinking water locations to OpenStreetMap on the project wiki page.

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Project_of_the_week/2010/Sep_29

This is the first Project of the Month. Project of the Week returns next week, while PotM will continue until November. These projects inspire mappers to contribute data they might not have considered previously, and allow us to be inspired by the projects of other mappers.

This is your Project of the Month. Make suggestions. Inspire other mappers. What is it about contributing to OpenStreetMap that interests you? Postboxes? Bowing alleys? Share your OpenStreetMap obession by contributing a Project of the Month.

The first Mapnik Code Sprint, dubbed Committers and Cartographers, got underway a few hours ago, during the English morning. After a few hours of introductions, background discussion, planning and lunch, the audio feed has been reduced to the tapping of keyboards. As the voices became less frequent, the updates on the #mapnik IRC channel became more frequent with changesets and trac comments in abundance.

So the code sprint has started in earnest now.

A code sprint is an in-person meeting to collectively tackle programming problems that are more difficult to solve individually. Committers and Cartographers is focusing on removing bugs from the current Mapnik code base, adding advanced cartography features and planning for the next releases of Mapnik.

Attendees have traveled to London to participate from as far away as Ukraine, USA and even Charlbury. Online participants are expected, time zones permitting, from many other countries as the code sprint continues this weekend.

Mapnik is a map rendering library that is used to create map images from geographic data. Many web sites use Mapnik to render OpenStreetMap data including the main OpenStreetMap web site which has a layer called Mapnik.

Committers and Cartographers is only possible because of the generous donation of time and expertise of each of the participants. Thank you! We can’t wait to see all of the improvements in Mapnik.

Thank you, CloudMade, for hosting the Mapnik Code Sprint in your London office.

MapQuest announced a beta open map using OSM data and tools from the OSM stack during State of the Map in July 2010. The initial announcement was only for England, but you could still see that they had the full OSM planet available at the http://open.mapquest.co.uk address.

Now they have announced the domains for Spain, Italy, Germany and France.

In July MapQuest also announced that they were earmarking $1 Million for investments that will improve OSM data in USA. They have now hired somebody to manage that investment fund, and it is OSM contributor Hurricane Coast.

See the details in the press release and coverage on TechCrunch Europe.

When I see announcements flying around like MapQuests $1M commitment to OSM, or CloudMades $12M VC round it begs the question of how big is the OSM economy?

Purely as an academic exercise it’s interesting to think of OSM as an ecosystem around which people find work and provide goods and services. But also perhaps it would be a nice exponential graph to show as a slide along with user growth.

We have some limit cases. In 2004 when founded, the economy was approximately zero. Or was it? Do we measure volunteer hours? How about the power and bandwidth the servers are burning? Or is that negligible compared to the other large numbers thrown around?

Today I would estimate we have about 5 people freelancing on OSM work worldwide. Perhaps 50 that do OSM work as part of their job, say writing a plugin or using the data. Full-time employees working explicitly on OSM? Perhaps 50 again. These are all guesses with some rough education behind them. These numbers would probably follow the kind of growth curves that various projects around linux did, rather than wikipedia I’m guessing. Because wikipedia was much more about the destruction of value around britannica and others, and the secondary service and otherwise market around wikipedia is pretty small (I think?). Unless you count MediaWiki itself.

Once you have the criteria of what goes in to the measuring pot of the “OSM economy” you further have large error bars on the data for each thing. For example, are those freelancers going to tell you what kind of money they’re making?

Contributing to OpenStreetMap is a collaborative activity. We each submit data knowing that our personal data becomes our collective data. At times we hope that our contributions will be seen as acceptable and good enough. At other times we hope that other mappers will help us refine and improve our contributions. As much as OpenStreetMap is a group project, often we each make our contributions in isolation.

This isn’t always the case. We have Mapping Parties and Stammtisch and meetups and various social tools to contact and connect with other mappers.

The Project of the Week is to meet another mapper in some way.

Some of us prefer to meet virtually. Others like to meet face to face. Still others like to organize and facilitate. Participate in a way that you feel comfortable. When meeting people in person for the first time, take reasonable precautions.

You’ll find suggestions for meeting other mappers on the Project of the Week wiki page:

This is your Project of the Week. Make suggestions. Inspire other mappers. What is it about contributing to OpenStreetMap that interests you? Postboxes? Bowing alleys? Share your OpenStreetMap obession by contributing a Project of the Week.